"And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars."
Mabel had shampooed her mother's hair, following out with unending
patience the minute instructions which the process always involved. She
had rinsed it in four relays of hot water, two of lukewarm and one of
cold; she had dried it with the hard towel for the scalp and the soft
towel for the hair. She had rubbed brilliantine in to give it the
approved gloss. The whole proceeding had lasted fully two hours; now she
stood and brushed out the long fine threads of grey turning to silver
with just the steady gentle pressure which was necessary and which,
according to Mrs. Grant, no one but Mabel was capable of producing.
Mrs. Grant liked to have her hair brushed for half an hour after a
shampoo, it soothed the irritated nerves. From behind her mother's back
Mabel could see her own face in the glass, the sallow cheeks flushed
from her exertions, the grey, black-lashed eyes tired and a little
angry. Once, long ago, during one of their journeys on the continent,
there had been a young naval officer who had loved Mabel for those grey
eyes of hers. He had raved about the way the lashes lay like a fringe of
shadow round them. He had called them "Dream Eyes," and once he had
kissed the lids close shut over them with hard, passionate kisses.
Whenever Mabel looked at her eyes in the glass she thought of Jack
Donald. She had loved him and she had sent him away because of Mother.
He had only been able to offer her his love and the pay of a lieutenant
in the Navy; he had not even shown that he liked Mother, he had resented
the way Mabel slaved for her. Of course the outlook had been absurd, and
Mrs. Grant had said so very plainly. If Mabel married it would have to
be someone wealthy someone elderly enough to understand that Mother must
live with them. But when he went he took with him all the dreams of
Mabel's life; she never looked out into the future to make plans now,
she could only look back into the past that held her memories.
"I hope," said Mrs. Grant suddenly breaking in on her thoughts, "that
Dick does not fall in love with this young lady at the Manor."
"Why not?" asked Mabel, "he must fall in love sooner or later."
"Well, then, it must be later and with someone who has a great deal of
money. We are quite badly enough off as it is."
"You and I could go away again on our own," suggested Mabel, "you know
you said the other day that Wrotham was getting on your nerves."
"Don't be ridiculous," snapped Mrs. Grant, "I should like to know what
you think we should live on once Dick has a wife. You say you won't
marry Mr. Jarvis or anyone else."
"No," Mabel admitted, "but because I won't marry it hardly seems fair
that we should stand in the way of Dick's doing so."
"What do you intend to imply by 'standing in the way'? Really Mabel,
sometimes I wonder if you have any love for me, you so habitually and
wilfully misconstrue my sentences. Surely it is permissible" (Mrs.
Grant's sigh was a model of motherly affection) "for a mother to wish
to keep her son, her eldest born, to herself for a little longer. One
loses them so once they marry."
Mabel concealed a swift, rather bitter, smile. "I did not mean to
misconstrue anything," she said, "only just the other day I was thinking
that perhaps we did rather hamper Dick. He is twenty-seven, you know; it
is funny he has never wanted to marry."
"He is waiting for the right girl," Mrs. Grant sighed again.
"And if he happens to find her," thought Mabel to herself, there was no
use saying the words aloud, "we are to do our best to prevent him having
her. Poor old Dick." Her eyes waked to sudden, vivid affection as she
thought of him.
She ran downstairs presently, Mrs. Grant having retired to rest after
exertions, to meet Dick just coming in. He had done a round of visits
after his call at the Manor house. Visits which had included one to the
Rendles' cottage, where he had seen the principal figure of last night's
tragedy laid out, as her mother said, for decent burial, "even though it
baint a going to be Christian."
The girl had been dressed in something white; white flowers, great
beautiful-headed chrysanthemums, lay between her folded hands and
against her face. She had been a handsome girl, death had robbed her of
her vivid colouring, but it had given her in its stead something
dignified and withdrawn, a look of suffering and yet great peace.
Mrs. Rendle was more resigned too this morning; she had cried her heart
quiet through the night.
"Bridget is better so," she could confide to Dick as he stood looking
down at the girl, "the shame is done away with, sir, and God will look
to the sin. I hold there ain't much to fear there, even though they
won't bury her in the churchyard."
"No, I don't think there is much to fear," he agreed. "I am sorry about
the burial, Mrs. Rendle, I have tried to argue the matter out with the
vicar."
"Oh, that is not to be helped," she answered. "God will rest her soul
wherever she be. Miss Rutherford sent those flowers," she added, "she
was rare set agin Bridget to begin with, but she be softened down."
That brought the other tragedy which he had witnessed this morning back
to his mind. Not that he had really forgotten it. The picture of Joan,
her head high, her cheeks flushed, was one that had imprinted itself
very strongly upon his memory. He had given up trying to understand how
such a thing could have happened, his own vague happy thoughts of her
stirred wistfully behind the new knowledge. And he could not dismiss her
altogether from the throne he had designed for her to occupy. There must
be some explanation; if only he had not been such an absolute stranger
perhaps she would have told him a little more, have given him a chance
to understand.
"Well," asked Mabel, "is she nice, Dick, did you like her?" Her eyes
were quick to notice the new shadow of trouble on his face.
"Very nice, I think," he answered, hoping his voice sounded as
indifferent as he meant it to, "but I really did not see much of her and
she is going back to London almost at once." He went past her on into
the dining-room. "Is lunch nearly ready," he asked, "I have got to catch
that 2.5, you know."
"I'll see about it," Mabel said, "Mother is having hers upstairs."
She turned away to comply, but all the time she was hurrying up the
maidservant, and later, while she and Dick sat opposite each other,
rather silent, through lunch, her eyes and mind were busy trying to read
the secret of Dick's manner. The girl had impressed him strongly, that
was evident, but why should she have occasioned this gloom in Dick who
so very rarely allowed anything or anybody to ruffle his cheery good
humour?
He rode off without letting her glean any explanation, and Mabel
wandered into the drawing-room to get it ready for Mrs. Grant's
descent. Had Dick really fallen in love? She remembered once before when
he had been about eighteen or nineteen, how there had been a girl whom
he had rather shyly confessed himself enamoured of. But since the damsel
had been quite five years his senior the romance, to Mabel's relief, had
faded away. Yet if Dick were ever really to fall in love it would be a
deep and unshakable tie; he would be as his father had been, all
faithful to the one woman in his life.
It was remembering her father that suddenly brought Mabel's thoughts
back to her mother whose absorbing personality had stood so like a giant
shadow across all their lives. Would Dick's love be strong enough to
fight against his sense of duty and mother's selfishness, for most
certainly mother would not help him to achieve his desire unless it ran
along the same lines as her own. And if mother prevailed what would life
mean for Dick? The same dry empty dreariness that her own days
contained, the restless hopes that died too hard, the unsatisfied, cruel
dreams? No, no! She had not fought to save her own happiness, but she
would fight to the last inch to save Dick's.
Almost as if in answer to her heart's wild outcry the front-door bell
rang, and looking up she saw the short stout figure which of late had
taken to haunting her thoughts on the door-step.
Mr. Jarvis was an elderly man inclined to be fat, with round, heavy
face, very thick about the jaws and unpleasantly small eyes. Yet the
expression of the man's face was not altogether disagreeable and a
certain shrewd humour showed in the lines of his mouth. He had lived for
forty-two years in Wrotham, travelling twice a year to London in
connection with his business, but never venturing further afield. His
house, a magnificent farm building, lay about twelve miles away on the
other side of Wrotham station. It had come down to him through
generations of Jarvises, he was reputed to be marvellously wealthy, and
he had no shyness about admitting the fact. His favourite topics of
conversation were money and horses. He had never married, village gossip
could have given you lurid details as to the why and the wherefore had
you been willing to listen. Mr. Jarvis himself would have put it more
plainly. The only woman he had ever had the least affection for had
neither expected nor desired matrimony; she had been content to live
with him as his housekeeper. This woman had been dead three years when
Jarvis first met Mabel. Quite apart from the fact that of late he had
been feeling that it was time he got married, Jarvis had been attracted
to Mabel from the first. She was such a contrast to the other women he
had known; he admired enormously her slim delicacy, her faintly coloured
face, her grey eyes. He liked her way of talking, too, and the long
silences which held her; her quiet dignity, the way she moved. He placed
her on a pedestal in his thoughts, which was a thing he had never dreamt
of doing for any other woman, and before long his admiration melted into
love. Then being forty-two the disease took rapid and tense possession.
He was only happy when he was with her, able to talk to her now and
again, to watch her always.
Dick's impression was that Mabel hated the man. He disliked him himself,
which perhaps coloured his view, for hate was not quite what Mabel felt.
Had Mr. Jarvis been content to just like her she would have tolerated
and more or less liked him. She had thought him, to begin with, a funny,
in a way rather pathetic, little man. Ugly, and Mabel had such an
instinctive sympathy for anything ugly or unloved. So, to begin with,
she had been kind to him; then one day Mrs. Grant had opened her eyes to
the evident admiration of the man, mentioning at the same time that from
the money point of view he would be a good match, and suddenly Mabel had
known that she was afraid. Afraid, without exactly knowing why, very
much as is the hapless sheep on his way to the slaughter-house.
As the maid ushered in Mr. Jarvis a minute or two later this feeling of
fear caught at Mabel's heart, and in answer to its summons the warm
blood flushed to face and neck as she stood up to receive him.
"I am early," stammered the man, his eyes on her new-wakened beauty, for
it was only in her lack of colour that Mabel's want of prettiness lay,
"but I came on purpose, I wanted to catch you alone."
Mabel took what was almost a despairing look at the clock. "Mother won't
be down for quite half an hour," she said, "so you have succeeded. Shall
we stay here or will you come down to the garden? I want to show you my
Black Prince rose, it is not doing at all well."
She moved to the window which opened doorways on to the garden, but Mr.
Jarvis made no attempt to follow her.
"Let us stay here," he said, "what I have got to say won't take long and
we can do the roses afterwards when Mrs. Grant is about. I guess you
could help me a bit if you only chose to," he went on, his voice
curiously gruff and unready, "but you won't, you won't even look at me.
I suppose those great grey eyes of yours hate the sight of me, and I am
a damned fool to put my heart into words. But I have got to," she heard
him move close to her and how quickly he was breathing, "I love you, you
pale, thin slip of a girl, I want you as a wife, will you marry me?"
The silence when he had finished speaking lay heavy between them. Mabel
let him take her hand, though the moist warmth of his gave her a little
shudder of aversion, but by no strength of will could she lift her eyes
to look at him. She stood as immovable as a statue and the man, watching
her from out of his small shrewd eyes, smiled a little bitterly.
"You hate the thought like poison," he said, "yet you don't throw off my
hand or yell out your 'No.' Something is in the balance then. Well,
marry me for my money, Mabel. I had rather it were love, but if there is
anything about me that can win you, I am not going to give you up."
That flicked at her pride and the honesty of it appealed to her. She
lifted her eyes and for the first time she became aware of the real
kindness that lay in his.
"I have never hated you," she said slowly, "but I don't and can't love
you. Will you take that as your answer?"
The man shook his head. "I was not fool enough to ask--'Do you love
me?'" he reminded her; "what I want to know is, 'Will you marry me?'"
"Without love?"--her eyes besought him--"marriage must be hideous."
"I will risk it if you will," he answered. "Sit down, let us talk it
out."
He had won back his self-possession, though his eyes were still eager in
their demand. Mabel sat down on the window-seat and he pulled up a chair
at a little distance from her.
"Look here," he began, "it is like this. I am not a young man, probably
I am twelve to fourteen years older than you. If you have heard what the
village scandal says about me you can take it from me that it is true;
it is better that you should know the worst at once. But until I met
you, this I can swear before God, I have never really loved. It is not a
question of money this time; I would give my soul to win you. And I
don't want you as I have wanted the other women in my life; I want you
as my wife."
"Yet you can buy me just as you could them," Mabel whispered.
"No"--again he shook his head. "I am not making that mistake either. I
know just why I can buy you. Anyway, let us put that aside. This is the
case as I see it. I have money, heaps of it; I have a good large house
and servants eating their heads off. I will make Mrs. Grant comfortable;
she will live with us, of course, and she is welcome to everything I
have got; and I love you. That is the one great drawback, isn't it? The
question is. Will you be able to put up with it?"
Away in the back of Mabel's mind another voice whispered, "I love you."
She had to shut her lids over the "Dream Eyes," to hold back the tears.
"Even if things were different," she said, "I could not love you; I have
always loved someone else."
Mr. Jarvis sat back in his chair with a quick frown. "Any chance of his
marrying you?" he asked.
"No," she had to admit, "there has never been any chance of that."
"I see"--he looked up at her and down again at his podgy, fat hands,
clenched together. "My offer still holds good," he said abruptly.
"Oh, I don't know what to say or what to do." Mabel's calm broke, she
stood up nervously. It almost seemed as if the walls of the room were
closing in on her. "There are so many things to think of; Mother and
Dick and----"
Perhaps he understood the softening of her voice as she spoke of Dick,
for he looked up at her quickly.
"Yes, there is your brother," he agreed. "I guess he is pretty tired
having to look after you two, and he is a clever lad; there ought to be
a future before him if he has his chance. Put the weight on to my
shoulders, Mabel; they are better able to bear it."
She turned to him breathlessly; it was quite true what he was saying
about Dick. Dick had his own life to make. "I have told you the truth,"
she said. "I don't love you, probably there will be times when I shall
hate you. If you are not afraid of that, if you are ready to take Mother
and me and let us spend your money in return for that, then--I will
marry you."
Mr. Jarvis got quickly to his feet. "You mean it?" he gasped; his face
was almost purple, he came to her, catching her hands in his. "You mean
it? Mind you, Mabel, you have got to put up with my loving you. I am
not pretending that I am the kind of man who will leave you alone."
"I mean it," she answered, very cold and quiet, because it seemed as if
all the tears in her heart had suddenly hardened into a lump of stone.